Recent advancement in antenna technology is expected to enable increasingly advanced antennas to be deployed in cellular radio networks. Antennas that are re-configurable in terms of beam-shape, so called re-configurable antenna systems (RAS) are already in use. Beam-forming and communication device beam-tracking is also gaining momentum. Further still, it is expected that very large antennas comprising several hundreds individually controlled antenna elements will become available within a near future.
Advanced antenna solutions are very promising but they also bring along a set of new challenges that will need to be addressed. A difficulty that may arise when the network nodes use antenna devices of different types, and with different degrees of advanced signal processing, is that measurements performed by different network nodes may not be entirely comparable for different reasons.
Introduction of advanced adaptive antennas may for example make measurements in downlink, i.e. from network node to communication device, less useful e.g. for making handover decisions. In current state-of-the-art networks, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), the communication device estimates a post-handover quality of a candidate node by comparing cell specific reference signals received power (RSRP) measurements made towards candidate target nodes in order to establish possible performance after handover.